Travelling Places: A Non-Symposium

How can place travel?

Through networks of migration, trade, and exchange engendered in both deep time and every day, place and travel are integral to contemporary Indigenous experiences. Perhaps we can understand migration, trade and exchange as forms of commuting, and understand ourselves as commuting cultures. With commuting cultures come commuting knowledges which travel, exchange and take form over time and cross distance.

This notion of commuting is the framework of how the Visiting Curators* – a curatorium of five curators, artists and writers from across the Great Ocean – are collaborating. Over three exhibition projects we have been interrogating the interconnection of both place and travel through a series of commissioned works by artists also located around the Great Ocean. In considering the conditions that engender our mobility as arts workers as well as the desire to build meaningful exchange across the waters, the curatorium has sought to foreground complex, wide-ranging experiences of Indigeneity that are inclusive of both ancestral knowledges and global connections.

Travelling Places: A Non-Symposium is a day of storytelling, skill sharing and dialogue centred on notions of place. As a Non-Symposium, the event rejects the authorial, academic voice in favour of asserting multivocality and openness as imperative to building understanding and collective futures.

*The Visting Curators are Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash, Chicana), Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka), Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa, Irān, Guangdong), Tarah Hogue (Métis, Dutch Canadian) and Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa).

Layover is the second iteration of an ongoing curatorial project which was initiated in 2017 at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane culminating in the exhibition The Commute, with the third iteration, Transits and Returns to open at the Vancouver Art Gallery in September 2019. Layover then marks the midpoint of this journey.

Travelling Places: A Non-Symposium is supported by Auckland Arts Festival and Vancouver Art Gallery.

SCHEDULE

10.00am - 10.10am
Mihi Whakatau

10.10am - 11.30am
Storytelling with Qiane Matata-Sipu, Melanie Rands, Daniel Twiss

11.30am - 12.45pm
Break Outs: Choose a session with either Sarah, Freja or Lana

tpɨtɨ, tpɨlipɨʔ: acorn cake, elder jam, and relations across łpasini, Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini, Chicana)
Chatting over acorn cake and elderberry jam, like many generations past and future, Sarah will talk particular histories and cultural confluences of yak titʸu titʸu (Indigenous peoples) across łpasini, the sea, in places now known broadly as California.

Plenty of fish in the sea, Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa)
Join Lana for an ‘oka demonstration (will be shared as part of lunch) while she shares some of her thinking about the Moana as featured in her book False Divides.

Strands and stories, Freja Carmichael (Quandamooka)
Belonging to a family of Quandamooka weavers, Freja will share string making techniques and stories of her place of significance – Salt Water Country.

12.45pm - 1.45pm
Lunch: BC Collective

1.45pm - 2.30pm “we were never still,” Tarah Hogue (Métis, French Canadian, Dutch)
This presentation and discussion considers how movement deeply informs experiences of Indigeneity, from deep time to the present. Attendees are invited to contribute their own stories of migration, displacement, and visiting in response to Tarah’s offering.

2.30 - 3.15pm
Great Ocean Futures in recent art history, Léuli Eshraghi
(Sāmoa, Irān, Guangdong)
Léuli will discuss diverse ideas of time, space, nationhood and futures in recent works and texts by Indigenous artists and thinkers from around the Great Ocean.

3.15pm - 3.30pm
Closing Remarks by The Visiting Curators and Daniel Twiss